Empty Hands Music
In the spirit of giving thanks this holiday season, we share with you a wonderful music video in the spirit of gratitude with the hope it will be spread wide and far, overflowing into acts of love and compassion.
We present to you, “Grateful: A Love Song to the World.”
Brenda Núñez, voter registration supervisor for Nueces County, shows the home screen of the state's voter registration system in 2024. Election officials say they're still struggling to use the system, known as TEAM, to complete essential tasks.
At 6 p.m. a few days after the state sent Randall County election administrator Shannon Lackey a backlog of 3,388 of voter registration records, she was still at her desk, processing them after a full day of work.
She planned to stay late and get as much done as she could, then keep working from home. Lackey, whose department has five employees, isn’t expecting overtime pay or compensatory time off to make up for the extra work caused by the state error.
The most frustrating part, she said, was that the state’s voter registration and management system, known as TEAM, was making it harder to get through the backlog.
“I just got a message saying ‘an error occurred’,” Lackey said while on the phone with a Votebeat reporter. “I cannot tell you how many times I get that message, ‘an error occurred,’ so I’m just clicking. Nothing’s happening. I can’t work right now.”
She said her only choice is to push through.
“I have to get this done” she said, but “how are we going to fix it? And if it’s not fixable, where do we go from here? Because this is unacceptable.”
Local election officials across the state have raised concerns about TEAM since the state rolled out a long-awaited upgrade more than a year ago. Now they must use the system to resolve a backlog of hundreds of thousands of voter registration records and updates state officials sent them due to a software error with the Texas Department of Public Safety web portal. Many say the issues with TEAM are making the backlog harder to resolve at a critical time.
State officials discovered the error just weeks before today’s deadline for Texans to register to vote in time for the critical midterm elections. Election officials are already contending with the typical high volume of voter registration applications delivered in person and by mail at the last minute in the coming days.
Some better-resourced and larger county election departments have been able to quickly resolve their backlogs with help from outside vendors, but they’re also still reporting problems interacting with TEAM.
Election officials said it is still difficult to verify voters’ eligibility when processing voter registration applications, and process mail-in ballots in TEAM, among other tasks.
“Based on the direct experiences of county election officials across the state, it has become evident that these problems are the result of fundamental system architecture failures by the state’s voter registration database vendor, Civix,” the Texas Association of County Election Officials said in a statement last week.
With the election just weeks away, the state should “ensure the delivery and maintenance of reliable voter registration database software” before any further payments are made to Civix, which is based in Louisiana, the statement said.
Civix did not respond to a request for comment.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office said it’s offering counties grants to reimburse their costs to process the backlogged applications.
In an emailed statement, Alicia Pierce, the spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said the agency has communicated directly with counties about TEAM “on a continual basis.” Pierce said the agency conducted trainings throughout the state for the rollout and continues to offer webinars. “We send weekly emails with updates on production builds and development work, and we host monthly calls for counties to ask questions,” she wrote.
“Texas has had seven successful elections since the rollout of the newly developed TEAM,” she added. “Additional features addressing county concerns will be rolled out soon as we all prepare for the November election.”
The agency has resolved some functionality issues with TEAM and has improved it some since its July 2025 launch, election officials told Votebeat, but fixes often take months. In other cases, when one problem is resolved, another pops up.
Some voting rights advocates say local election officials have enough burdens without adding technological problems to the mix.
“If I had to log on to a system every day and have no idea if it was going to work today like it worked yesterday, I think I would lose my mind,” said Emily Eby French, policy director at Common Cause Texas. “But we are asking county officials to follow hundreds and hundreds of statutes in the Texas Election Code, keep ballots safe, protect the security of the elections, while not knowing how or if TEAM will work for them.”
In January 2024, at an annual gathering of election officials, the state showed an early video demonstration of new features the upgraded TEAM system would have. They said it would help election officials complete tasks more quickly and efficiently.
Hundreds of election officials clapped and cheered in excitement. They’d been waiting years for such upgrades.
But “those promises are still unmet,” Kristin Miles, the Bastrop County elections administrator and current president of the Texas Association of County Election Officials, said in an interview. “We’re not even at basic functionality, much less bells and whistles that had county election officials excited back then.”
Texas promised to pay Civix $17 million, and up to $36 million if the state renews the contract in October 2027, public records show. The secretary of state’s office said the cost is covered by a mix of state dollars and federal funds earmarked for improving election administration.
Officials in each of the state’s 254 counties interact with the TEAM system on a daily basis to conduct voter list maintenance and manage elections. Roughly 18 counties use state-approved outside vendors to manage their voter registration lists, but must still sync their data with TEAM daily and rely on TEAM for other essential functions.
Three local election officials told Votebeat they are struggling with verifying voters’ eligibility, a key step that must be done in TEAM.
That step confirms a voter’s name, date of birth, and partial Social Security number or driver’s license number matches state records, essentially ensuring that the registrant is who they say they are. It’s an automated process, and the majority of the time it works. But in some cases, election officials said they have waited weeks — up to 60 days — for that verification, and they aren’t sure why.
A long delay risks that the voter doesn’t show up on the rolls when they try to actually vote, said Michelle Allcon, the Smith County elections administrator.
“I can’t tell what that application is missing so we can fix it. It’s just stuck,” Allcon said. She said election administrators first flagged the problem in May. “Then those voters are calling me, asking ‘what’s going on? Why haven’t I gotten my voter registration certificate?’ And we look into it and see that there’s no action.”
Allcon, along with other election officials, said the secretary of state’s office typically confirms creation of an IT ticket to resolve the problem, but isn’t necessarily able to give a timeline for the fix.
Some election officials say they have come up with workarounds. Trudy Hancock, the Brazos County election administrator, said her staff has created a spreadsheet to track which mail ballots have been sent and received, as well as to sort them by voter ID number, name, and date, a feature that TEAM doesn’t have. In TEAM, her staff isn’t able to select a batch of mail-in ballot records at once to mark them as sent or received. Instead, they have to be updated one by one, which is time-consuming. The spreadsheet helps the elections team organize the ballots before marking them in the TEAM system. Her staff is keeping track of more than 1,800 mail ballots, Hancock said last week.
Although no technology rollout is ever perfect, other states have taken early steps to try and avoid problems later.
A 2024 report on four states that launched voter registration systems — Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Rhode Island — emphasized involving local election officials, who it described as the main users of such systems, from the start.
But in Texas, local election officials say they had little input. Miles, Lackey, Hancock and others say their testing of the system occurred only a couple of months before the TEAM upgrade went live.
The counties that use outside vendors rely less heavily on TEAM, though they still must use it. But those vendors can be costly, while TEAM is free.
Dallas County’s election department uses an outside vendor. That’s how they were able to quickly get through a backlog of nearly 70,000 records sent to them after the DPS error, Elections Administrator Paul Adams said in an interview.
“There are other counties where either they don’t have that access to vendors or they have limited staff. So for some counties it’s going to be difficult, but everybody has contingency plans,” Adams said.
He said the main concern is what news of the backlog — and the state error that caused it — is doing to voters’ confidence.
“People are already concerned about the election; you start adding additional things onto it, and your voters are now concerned about the process,” he said.
Election Officials Are Scrambling To Process Voter Registration Backlog Using a System They Say Does Not Work was originally published by VoteBeat Texas and is republished with permission.
Group of voters stand in line at the community center so they can participate in voting.
Modern election cycles easily dissolve into narrative noise, fueled by media echo chambers, superficial viral sound bites, controversial attack ads, and candidate outrage. But beneath the headline churn, research is replete with evidence that building majorities in congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislature races belongs to those who persuade and mobilize voters across six key demographic blocs:
Non-partisan independents: The ultimate arbiters
As party bases become more predictable, “truly” independent voters (4½% of registered voters) remain the ultimate swing cohort and hold the decisive lever.
For the authentic independent voters, midterm choices rarely hinge on political ideology. Instead, they focus on economic fundamentals: everyday cost of living, inflation, the tariff burden on consumers, housing affordability, national debt, and fiscally responsible governance (or not). The truly independent voter also dislikes unnecessary foreign conflict, out-of-control immigration border enforcement, and dishonest and corrupt politicians. The political party that wins over bona fide independent voters in the suburbs usually takes control of the legislature.
College-educated vs. working class
The suburban voters are no longer a uniform voting bloc. Today, education and household economics drive the suburban divide.
College-educated suburbanites respond strongly to candidates' debates over reproductive rights and institutional governance. These voters have steadily trended toward the Democratic Party in recent election cycles. As a result, they now serve as a crucial defensive firewall in key suburban districts across states like California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
Non-college and working-class households are hyper-sensitive to daily cost-of-living expenses, loan interest rates, and tax policies. In closely contested regions like the Midwest and Sun Belt, even a small shift in support among these middle-income voters can redefine the political map, a definite swing-voter demographic.
Youth turnout vs. senior citizens
Midterm election outcomes reflect a structural tug-of-war between volatile youth voter participation and consistent senior citizen turnout.
Turnout among young voters (ages 18-29) historically fluctuates, but their preference for the Democratic Party is clear. For campaigns, capturing this demographic comes down to two factors: enthusiasm to vote and focused messaging. If young voters don’t vote, GOP candidates will benefit.
Meanwhile, voters ages 65 and older have the highest, most consistent turnout, driven largely by conservative leanings, a civic habit of voting, and a deep stake in protecting safety-net government programs.
Hispanic and Black voters
The Hispanic electorate – the nation’s second-largest voting bloc – is defined by its regional and demographic diversity. Inflation, wages, housing, healthcare, immigration, and gun violence are the top priorities of Hispanic voters. In key Southwestern states, thin shifts among Hispanic working-class voters and young men will likely decide the election.
Black voters are a foundational pillar for Democratic coalitions, especially in Southern gubernatorial and congressional contests. Among Black voters, cost of living, gun policy, and women’s healthcare remain top priorities. The interplay between get-out-the-vote in urban areas and suburban turnout among Black voters determines whether Democratic candidates can offset the conservative vote that exists in rural areas.
The suburban gender gap and parental status
The difference between male and female voting patterns continues to widen; there are about 10 million more registered female voters than male voters, and females vote in higher percentage than men. Within this dynamic, suburban women and mothers stand out as one of the most influential swing voting demographics.
Rather than voting on single issues, suburban women highly value and monitor family cost-of-living expenses, public safety, public education standards, public library access, and healthcare. Candidates who articulate balanced solutions for economic stabilization and personal freedom hold a distinct persuasive advantage with this group.
Sun Belt vs. Rust Belt
Regional realities sharply split electoral strategies.
The Sun Belt (Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas) is defined by rapid population shifts, expanding metropolitan areas, and rising racial diversity. Candidate competitiveness turns on a party’s ability to register and mobilize new suburban residents while maintaining high participation in surrounding non-metro counties.
The Rust Belt and industrial Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) hinge on working-class households, union members and non-college-educated voters, balanced against turnout in major metropolitan centers.
Nov. 3 election bottom line
Midterm elections are rarely decided by sweeping national consensus. Instead, victory belongs to the party that best executes targeted engagement across these six critical voter segments. Simply put, it comes down to sound marketing, strategic thinking, and precise tactical execution.
Whichever party persuades non-partisan independents, addresses working-class economic concerns, and mobilizes its core demographic anchors will shape executive statehouses and command the legislative balance of power in Washington, D.C.
We the People
Voting isn’t just a right – it’s our civic duty. Not voting lets the bad politicians win by default. On or before Tue., Nov. 3, vote!
Steve Corbin, Professor Emeritus of Marketing, University of Northern Iowa, and non-paid freelance guest columnist and contributor to 148 newspapers and 37 social media platforms in 44 states.
Washington DC against the background of the US flag, USA
The Winner-Take-All (WTA) Electoral College system is arguably the least democratic mechanism for political independents in the United States because it completely erases their voices, forces artificial binary choices, and systemically bars them from meaningful participation.
The WTA Electoral College is the political duopoly’s most powerful defense mechanism, structurally engineered to block third parties and preserve the two-party monopoly. Applied by 48 states and Washington D.C., the WTA rule dictates that the candidate who wins a simple plurality of a state’s popular vote receives 100% of that state's electoral votes.
Here is how the WTA system disenfranchises independent voters and candidates:
Total Vote Erasure
The "All-or-Nothing" Rule: In 48 states and Washington, D.C., a presidential candidate who wins a simple plurality of a state’s popular vote receives 100% of that state’s electoral votes.
The Independent Penalty: If an independent candidate wins 20% or 30% of the vote in a state, those votes are immediately discarded. The candidate walks away with zero electoral votes, effectively rendering the ballots of independent voters meaningless.
Forced Binary and Strategic Voting
The "Spoiler Effect" and Strategic Voting
The WTA system weaponizes the psychological phenomenon of strategic voting against alternative parties. Because voters understand that minor-party candidates are mathematically locked out of winning a state's winner-take-all block, voting for them feels futile.
More severely, it creates the spoiler effect, where voting for a third party actively hurts the major candidate closest to them ideologically, inadvertently helping elect the candidate they dislike the most.
Major parties rely on this dynamic to police their flanks, deploying the message that "a vote for a third party is a vote for the opposition" to force voters back into the duopoly's tent. [1]
The Less-Of-Two-Evils Trap: Independents are routinely forced into strategic voting—casting a ballot for a major-party candidate they dislike just to prevent a worse outcome, rather than voting for the independent candidate they actually support.
Impossible Thresholds for Victory
The 270 Requirement: To win the presidency, a candidate must secure an absolute majority of 270 electoral votes.
Severe Ballot Access and Media Barriers
Petitions and Deadlines: Major parties get automatic ballot placement, while independents must navigate 51 different sets of hyper-complex rules, collecting millions of signatures at immense financial cost.
Debate Exclusion: The Commission on Presidential Debates requires candidates to poll at 15% nationwide to participate. However, gaining that traction is nearly impossible when the WTA system signals to voters and media outlets that an independent candidate is non-viable from the start.
In the 1992 U.S. presidential election, independent candidate Ross Perot reached a peak polling high of 39% in June 1992 but ultimately secured 18.9% of the popular vote and 0 electoral votes in the November general election.
By design, the WTA Electoral College treats American politics as a zero-sum game between two entrenched factions, leaving tens of millions of independent voters structurally locked out of the democratic process.
WTA Electoral College states that single-winner, plurality-based voting systems naturally result in a two-party system. The WTA Electoral College entrenches the Democratic-Republican duopoly through several distinct mechanisms:
High Barriers to Entry vs. Geographic Dispersion
To win the presidency, a candidate must secure an absolute majority of 270 electoral votes. Under a proportional system, a third-party candidate winning 15% of the national popular vote would receive 15% of the power. However, under the WTA rules, a third party can win 15% to 20% of the vote across every single state and walk away with zero electoral votes. To win any electoral votes at all, a minor party must possess highly concentrated regional support capable of outright winning a state, a feat that is nearly impossible for broad, ideologically driven third parties.
Co-Optation of Competitive Platforms
Because the WTA system rewards marginal victories with absolute power (e.g., winning a state 49% to 48% nets 100% of its electors), the two major parties are highly incentivized to neutralize external threats. If a third-party movement gains momentum and threatens to siphon off critical percentage points in swing states, the major parties will strategically absorb the third party's most popular policy positions. Once the duopoly co-opts the platform, the third party loses its distinct purpose, collapsing back into the two-party apparatus.
Consolidated Financial and Media Structures
The certainty provided by the WTA system allows the duopoly to construct impenetrable funding and media networks. Donors, political action committees (PACs), and media outlets direct their resources exclusively toward the two viable major parties, viewing minor parties as a waste of capital. This starvation of resources ensures third parties can rarely build the statewide operations necessary to compete in a winner-take-all landscape.
Ultimately, while the U.S. Constitution does not mandate a two-party system, the state-level adoption of winner-take-all rules acts as a structural firewall. It guarantees that no matter how much dissatisfaction exists with the major parties, alternative choices are mathematically suppressed before they can ever threaten the duopoly's grip on the presidency.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the overall popular vote nationwide.
The National Popular Vote interstate Compact (NPVIC) What It Is - Why It's Needed, YouTube video is summarized as, follows:
What It Is
The Mechanism: Participating states pass laws pledging their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (the total number of individual votes cast across all 50 states and D.C.).
The Trigger: The compact does not change the U.S. Constitution. It stays inactive until enough states join to reach 270 electoral votes, the magic number required to win the presidency.
The Result: Once activated, it guarantees that the candidate who receives the most votes across the entire country wins the White House, without needing a constitutional amendment.
Current Status: As of August 31,2026, 18 states and Washington, D.C., representing 222 electoral votes, have enacted the compact, needing 48 more electoral votes to take effect.
Why It's Needed
Prevents Popular Vote Mismatches: Under the current Electoral College system, a candidate can win the national popular vote yet still lose the election (which happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016). Proponents argue this undermines the democratic principle that the candidate with the most votes should win.
Eliminates Swing State Focus: Currently, presidential campaigns focus almost entirely on a handful of tightly contested "battleground" states. Voters in safely "red" or "blue" states are largely ignored. The NPVIC ensures every vote in every state matters equally.
Encourages Higher Voter Turnout: When people feel their individual votes do not matter in a lopsided state, they may stay home. The compact gives every citizen a direct stake in the national total, boosting civic participation
Hugh J. Campbell, Jr., CPA, is a Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) professional and a student of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician often credited as the catalyst for the Japanese economic miracle after WWII.
Old Bible with background of American flag
Andy Beshear, Kentucky's democratic governor, has a new book out this week called Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country. The publisher describes it as an effort to “reclaim faith as a force for good” and counter people who use religion to harm and discriminate. Given Beshear’s prominence in Democratic politics and his having been named a presidential frontrunner, it is all but certain to be a New York Times bestseller.
Beshear isn’t alone. A growing number of politicians are writing and running for office in a faith-inflected register:
• Cory Booker, NJ Senator (Stand: An Urgent Call to Rekindle Our Shared American Ideals) • Raphael Warnock, Georgia Senator, ordained minister (The Crooked Places Made Straight)
• Josh Shapiro, Governor of Pennsylvania (Where We Keep the Light)
• Chris Murphy, CT Senator (Crisis of the Common Good)
• Spencer Cox, Governor of Utah (R) (Off Ramp)
• James Talarico, Democrat running for Senate in Texas, seminarian
• Adam Hamilton, running for Senate in Kansas, ordained minister and longtime author
Whatever their deeper motivations, one thing is clear—at least for Democrats: they are betting that faith-inflected political language and moral storytelling will be strategic assets heading into the midterms and the 2028 presidential election.
The words “faith,” “spiritual crisis,” “spirituality,” even “cults” saturate these books. This vocabulary lets politicians address the country’s emotional and civic anxieties without sounding partisan or technocratic. It also allows Democrats to reclaim moral language from the religious right and potentially broaden their coalition among Black and Latino voters—communities that are more religious than average Americans and essential to electoral success. In a moment when politicians are widely reviled, it lets them cast themselves as healers, even prophets.
Is This a Sign of a “Turning”?
I’ve often compared our time to the Gilded Age—another era of dizzying inequality, institutional fragility, and social fragmentation. That period, and the Progressive Era that followed, was drenched in moral and religious rhetoric.
Politicians like Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and William Jennings Bryan didn’t merely use faith language; they wrapped themselves in it. Roosevelt thundered, “We stand at
Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.” Wilson spoke of America’s “spiritual purpose” and its calling to “show the world a new path of justice and peace.” Bryan, the most prophetic of them all, confronted financial elites with his famous warning: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
This surge of moral rhetoric wasn’t stylistic flourish. It was part of a broader effort to stabilize a society coming apart at the seams—what some historians describe as a Great Turning, a moment when a society undergoes sweeping shifts in its moral, political, and economic structure.
The same destabilizing forces are at work today:
• Breakneck technological change
• Staggering wealth inequality
• Untrustworthy institutions
• Historically high stress and loneliness
In such moments, politicians reach for the language of conscience, purpose, sacrifice, and redemption because citizens are searching for grounding—not just governance.
If Politicians Sound Like Preachers…
If politicians sound like preachers, it may be because citizens are listening like congregants— hungry for moral steadiness in a spiritually unsettled time. The Gilded Age shows that moral rhetoric resonates when people feel overwhelmed. Today, 76% of Americans report deep anxiety about the nation’s future.
Whether this moment marks a Great Turning or merely a shrewd political tactic will become clear in time. But if a turning is underway, its direction will depend less on politicians invoking moral language than on whether citizens step forward as moral agents.
That work begins not in Washington but in neighborhoods, congregations, and civic groups— where ordinary Americans choose to build trust, repair what is frayed, and take responsibility for one small piece of our common life.
Richard McKnight, PhD, is the author of When We The People Lead, The Leaders Will Follow.
